Schumpeter's vision of socioeconomics

Abstract

Just as Schumpeter many years ago had a brilliant vision of a new and broad kind of economics (what he called Sozialökonomik), so do many socioeconomists today have a similarly grand vision. Will they be able to implement it and translate it into important scientific works, on a par with the grandeur of the vision? Schumpeter's work may be relevant to answering this important question. Schumpeter experimented in his lifetime with two versions of socioeconomics, which were not equally successful. In his youth, he advocated a form of economic imperialism and erased the boundary between socioeconomics and the other social sciences. Later, however, Schumpeter accepted the valuable contributions that the noneconomic social sciences can also make to the understanding of economic phenomena, coming to advocate a collaboration between economics, sociology, economic history, and statistics.